> Ahh PCI ata controller, that's the difference. I'm using the mobo > controllers. No DMA on the PCI bus would theoretically take double the > CPU time (once to handle the ata traffic and again to handle the pci > traffic) the way I understand it (albeit not very well :) )
Yes, but I disabled DMA when the drive was on the onboard controller. I then also tried the PCI controller to see how that faired, with DMA enabled. Basically DMA just lets programs/devices talk without using CPU power, which is why with DMA enabled you can stream a mpg file from the hard drive to the pvr-x50 with almost NO cpu usage. If you have DMA disabled on the HD, then the CPU cycles are uses to move that data across the bus from one device to another... Either way, my fairly obvious problem with the secondary IDE controller is that it's on the exact same bus as the pvr card, so they have to share all the buss bandwidth the machine has, which is probably 66Mhz on mine as well. > Since you are willing to build a new one, I saw someone mention > somewhere that most if not all VIA and Intel mobo chipsets are > supported. YMMV. If you get in the 1.8GZ range this problem should > disappear from what I've been told. Get one of those new fangled 800mzh > intel bus things :) it should work like a dream. Hehe, this was a project a friend and I said "Hey, it would be cool if we beet the TiVo man and built some free PVR's out of stuff we have lying around. All we need is $180 pvr cards!" This is now a $500 project, but I'm "willing" to drop the money on new (inexpensive) hardware, mainly because I've used MythTV enough to see how cool it is. It was working ok for me for about a week, so I got real used to watching recordings without commercials and it made me drool! > Overall, what I've seen about our problem, the bus speed seems to be the > limiting factor. CPU isn't the problem. I think my bus is running at > 66mzh. Probably anything you can buy now will make a difference > I saw a descent barebones on tigerdirect.com for about $200 a while > back. I don't see it now but I had to dig a bit before and I'm out of > time. If I run across it again Ill let you know While I agree the bus is a limiting factor, I just don't want to buy a 1.5-2Ghz cpu, board, ram, case, and find out it still doesn't work any better. That's why I'm pressed to find someone with a *working* MythTV setup and a PVR-350 with Tuner type = 47. I priced out some decent stuff for under $200, using the PVR and HD I have. Nice new pvr-ish case too. As for bus speed, I think PCI is still clocked at 66Mhz. That was the big advantage of AGP, it's a much faster bus and can make use of the faster bus on the boards themselves, and provides some other advantages like share memory with the system, rather than built on to the card, if you can call that an advantage. -Kenneth ------------------------------------------------------- SF email is sponsored by - The IT Product Guide Read honest & candid reviews on hundreds of IT Products from real users. Discover which products truly live up to the hype. Start reading now. http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=6595&alloc_id=14396&op=click _______________________________________________ ivtv-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ivtv-devel
